World Press Photo: the powerful symbol of a revolution in progress

Bruno Donnet 09:46, March 30, 2023

Every day, Bruno Donnet analyzes media productions. This morning, he chose to tell us an image, a press photograph that has just been awarded.

The photo received, yesterday, the regional prize awarded by the very prestigious international organization: World Press Photo.

It features a woman. A very young woman. She looks like she is in her early twenties and she is sitting alone, almost alone, in the street, probably on the terrace of a café.

In the foreground, because she is the heroine of photography, this young girl looks like the many young girls we are used to meeting here in our Western countries.

She wears beige pants, a pair of white basquettes, a blue T-shirt and a brown coat with her long brown hair covering the collar.

However, she has a somewhat melancholic look. It is not clear whether she is sad or disillusioned, but she stares at the lens with a sullen air.

The colors of the photo are, like her, a little dark. The image must have been captured at the end of the day, just before dusk, and the light is a bit pale.

But the great success of this image lies in the contrasts.

Because in the middle of this somewhat dull set, two big touches of color emerge: the table in front of which the girl is is yellow. Canary yellow. And the chair, on which she sits, is pink. A girly pink, shiny, which contrasts with the jet black of her long hair.

But a small detail: the photo was not taken in a country where women are free.

No, it was immortalized in Iran.

A country in which the mullahs' regime forces women to cover their hair and wear the Islamic veil.

For not having respected this obligation, a little more than six months ago, Masha Amini died, dead after being arrested by the terrible morality police. She was 22 years old. And the girl in the photo is about the same age.

But the contrast of this most striking image is in the background.

Just behind this pretty girl, bareheaded and hair in the winds, the sky is veiled. He is veiled but he is not the only one.

Because it is the contrast between the foreground and the background that gives all its strength to this photograph.

Behind the free-haired girl, the whole image is invaded by a procession of women. There are about ten of them. They work. They walk and they are fully veiled. Covered from head to toe by long black chadors that anonymize and invisibilise them, while the girl is unique, singular and by contrast effect, of infinite power.

This image Philippe, it is the photographer Ahmad Halabizaz who made it.

He is Iranian and for having captured and published this powerful symbol of the revolution that is currently underway in his country, he has just been sentenced to five years in prison and a permanent ban on exercising his profession.